The Day Before Yesterday: Adrian Smith, modern historian

I’m Adrian Smith, and have a chair in History at the University of Southampton – and this is my first blog entry (a historic moment!).  About ten days ago I was at last able to concentrate upon my principal research project across the next three years – writing a biography of Sir [Charles] Richard Fairey, aviation (and maritime) pioneer and industrialist, DG of the British Air Mission in wartime Washington, interwar advocate of selling aircraft to Stalin’s Russia, yachtsman, philanthropist, pioneer conservationist, and archetypal ‘big man’ running a big business, in this case Fairey Aviation and its various associates, most notably Fairey Marine and Belgium’s Avions Fairey.  This is a biography written in collaboration with and supported by the Fairey family, most notably the daughter and grand-daughter of CRS [the acronym commonly used in reference to Sir Richard] who live between Mottisfont and Stockbridge at Pittleworth Manor: Jane Tennant and Esther Bellamy respectively.  I have yet to meet the late John Fairey’s daughter, and CRF’s other grand-daughter, Sarah Jane, who lives at the principal family home in the Test Valley, Bossington; but will do so this Sunday, after which I  hope she will be similarly enthusiastic about this enterprise.  At this early stage I really need the help of the family as I endeavour to piece together CRF’s life in late Victorian and early Edwardian London.  Once he commences at the City and Guilds Institute’s pioneering and prestigious Finsbury Technical College, headed by the physicist Silvanus Thompson, then the archives (notably documents held at the London Metropolitan Archives) begin to deliver necessary information.  Once our man establishes his own company in 1915 then files held at the RAF Museum and the Fleet Air Arm Museum in Yeovilton become enormously helpful.  Tranches of the Fairey papers at the FAA Museum are being loaned to the special collections in the Hartley Library at the University thanks to the support and assistance of archivist Barbara Gilbert – I’ve twice visited her in Yeovilton to get an overview of what’s in the collection, and she has visited the Hartley to be assured re security, conservation, etc.  This blog will eventually have a home on the project website I am setting up, as well as within my History staff profile.  Excluding essays on my dad in City of Coventry, this is biography number three after Mick Mannock and Dickie Mountbatten.  I suspect it will be the most challenging as well as the most ambitious.  I’m now well and truly up and running, or as Mary my wife would put it, I’ve entered Faireyland.  I’ve drunk a pint of Wadworth’s Swordfish to signal I’m on my way, and a cracking colour photograph of a wartime Swordfish now constitutes the desktop on my laptop.  All I have to do is build the Airfix kit Mary bought me (marking the Kriegsmarine‘s 1942 dash up the Channel and not Taranto or the crippling of the Bismarck – almost every Swordfish was lost, so I hope this isn’t an inauspicious signal!), and I’ll have every accutrement a boy needs to write the life of someone who in his own quiet way was a serious player.  Onwards and upwards!